RIP Hettie Jones

Hettie Jones, an acclaimed poet, publisher, teacher, activist, and decades-long East Village resident, died on Aug. 13. She was 90.

A native New Yorker who grew up in Queens, Jones wrote 23 books, including three volumes of poetry and a memoir of the Beat Generation, as well as books for children and young adults, including "The Trees Stand Shining" and "Big Star Fallin’ Mama: Five Women in Black Music."

She was connected with the Beat poets, actively involved in social justice, and taught poetry and writing at New York University, The New School, Parsons School of Design, and other institutions.

PEN America, where Jones was a longtime member, shared details about her life: 

In the 1950s, she married the poet LeRoi Jones, who later changed his name to become the Black power nationalist Amiri Baraka. Hettie Jones spoke and wrote about the bigotry and antisemitism she faced at that time, both as a Jewish woman and a white woman married to a Black man. 

In 1957, the couple founded a literary magazine, Yugen, and the Totem Press, which published works by legendary Beat writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Williams S. Burroughs.

Later divorced, they had two daughters: Kellie Jones, a professor of art, archaeology and African American studies at Columbia University, and Lisa Jones Brown, a writer on staff at The Village Voice for 15 years. 

The family had lived at 27 Cooper Square since the early 1960s and the heyday of the Beats. 

Village Preservation has more about her fight to save her longtime home between Fifth Street and Sixth Street, where she lived for nearly six decades:

In 2007, when a hotel developer announced plans to build the 22-story Cooper Square Hotel, it looked like the 1844 Greek Revival house at 27 Cooper Square would be demolished. The four-story building that currently stands on this lot is of unknown origins. However, clues from a tax assessment records and historic maps indicate it might have been constructed between 1843 and 1845, as two narrow houses with ground-floor shops.

Given Hettie's petite size, it would be easy to call her successful effort to save the structure a David-and-Goliath triumph, but that would diminish her accomplishment. Remarkably, her gentle but persuasive stress on the building's age and artistic heritage convinced the hotel's owners. They opted to spare the building and simply utilize the structure's lower two floors for corporate headquarters. Hettie also convinced the hotel to reinstall the vintage stained glass window above the entrance door, which had been removed long before.

You can read more about her extraordinary life at The Associated Press and The New York Times.